Yea it was the DSM I was talking about, "
and the APA is now considering a proposal to include introversion in the next edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5)".
If international organizations can accept and validate such proposals then it just goes to show the lack of exposure introverts have in society. It's really hard to believe that with modernization and all the cultural and social developments that have happened in the last two centuries that something like introversion could be classified among a list of disorders and diseases.
Actually, it makes perfect sense.
It taught me quite a few interesting things, which I have combined with other information I picked up
In the past:
I was watching a series a while back, about the history of the home, through the centuries. In the Middle Ages, everyone lived in small villages of maybe a few hundred people each. When at work, people would make their own crafts, labouring solidly by themselves for many hours a day. So one was often working alone. Everyone would sit in the main room, where there was an open hearth. Cooking, relaxing, story-telling, almost everything would be with everyone crowded around the fire, all together. For entertainment, people would all sit together, watching one person tell a story very animatedly, or listening to a few people play music. It was like going to see a play at the theatre. Everyone felt part of the same event. Then at night, everyone in the house would sleep in the same bed, all together. In addition, there were regular village fairs, and large events, which everyone went to, and naturally encouraged people to mix with each other. Even in the 1950s, when people went to a dance, if a woman was asked to dance, by any man, it was considered impolite to refuse, unless she had previously promised the dance to another, and no man was allowed to hog a woman's attentions for the whole night. One would often take a bath wth others, so as to make the hot water stretch to as many as possible. So when one was at home, or at play, one's life was almost always sharing with others.
We used to live isolated from most people, severely limiting our possibilities for socialising. In general, when it made sense to be alone, we were alone, and when we were around others, we all shared our company with each other. We were very social.
We realised how limited we were in our posibilities for socialisng, and so we valued socialising, and took advantage of socialising, whenever and wherever it was reasonable to do so.
Nowadays:
harmfuff
Most of live in large cities, some of them numbering in the tens of millions. More people live in cities than ever before. we all work in the same office. But we are all in cubicles. We sit around, all together, but hardly talking to each other, and not even meeting each other's gaze. When people are home, they relax or are busy in whatever room of the house was most appropriate, with different people in different rooms of the same house. For entertainment, 20 years ago, we would all sit together watching TV, with everyone feeling like they were in their own little bubble, divorced from everyone else. Today, everyone has their own computer, and we are all sitting in the same room, but doing different things, and ignoring each other. Most of us have their own beds, and even their own rooms.In addition, people hardly ever have very large events, like neighbourhood street parties. At most modern events where dancing is present, people usually only dance with a few people of their choice. Often, many people don't have a dance for the whole night. Today, it would be unthinkable to share a bath at home, or a shower at home, with someone who one is not currently sexually intimate with.
We live our lives almost always in very close proximty to each other, such close enough proximity to others, that in the past, it would have been considered seriously anti-social, to not at greet each other, and exchange pleasantries to pass the time. So we have lots of possibilities for socialising. Yet, our activities are now arranged in such a way, that we are basically ignoring the people right who are right next to us. That is the height of anti-social behaviour.
We have arranged our lives in such ways, that there is much greater potential for socialising with others. However, that has enabled us to take socialising for granted, and we have allowed our activities to make us anti-social.
Our aim in the past centuries, has been to gain mastery over nature, to make life safe, happy and enjoyable for us, so that we could protect ourselves from harm, and to get everything we wanted, any time we wanted, in whatever way we wanted. However that was not always possible. So we would also try to adapt to things, and to live with nature. However, we treated the process of adapting to nature, as only a support to our desire to control nature. Whenever we found a way to control nature, we thought that it would no longer be useful to control ourselves. So Western progress has mostly been about learning how to force nature to do our bidding.
In the process, we have treated others as part of our environment. We could not directly try to control others, without others equally trying to control us. So instead, we have tried to control society, be outsourcing our dependency on society to tools and inanimate machines as much as possible, extraverting our needs onto others. We highly value emotionless sexual relationships. We value emotionally-sharing asexual friendships, as being the same as those acquaintances we met only a day ago, and hardly know, and so in the process devalue emotional sharing. We have effectively tried to impersonalise our dealings with people. In the process, we have re-defined intimacy, by the appearance of physical proximity, valuing sex most of all, and devalued intimate moments sharing our emotional self.
The result is that not physically being present at a social occasion, has been considered a lack of intimacy, while talking about our feelings and thoughts in great depth, is now often considered "over-sharing". Introverts prefer to share a lot of emotional intimacy with a few close friends. So we have effectively been moving away from the introverted perspective for quite a while.
Effectively, by extraverting our desires onto machines, to make them do them for us, we have devalued the benefits from getting closer to our introverted self, our inner selves.
In the process, this lack of understanding of our inner selves, has let our selves go haywire, causing mental illness. This symptom has also been extraverted, the lack of emotional intimacy being blamed on a lack of physical proximity, what we see, rather than on what it is, a lack of understanding of ourselves and others.
Introversion is not so much the problem. The problem is that we have moved away from introversion so much, that we consider extreme extroversion normal, and so even reasonable introversion is seen as aberrant behaviour.
Like so many who came before us, we have become the victims of our own success, revelling in our extremes, and deeming even the healthy balanced attitude to be dangerous.
R. D. Laing said that in an insane society, being sane seems insane to everyone else. This is as much true of extremes of extroversion, as anything else.
However, what if they conflict? Which one makes more sense to do?
If there is a tsunami coming, and everyone else is partying on the beach, then running away might be unpopular. But at least you're still alive. Sanity must generally rule the day.
